$30M BJWSA upgrade needed to cut river discharge

COLUMBIA — Cutting discharge into the Savannah River will come with an estimated $30 million cost for the Beaufort-Jasper Water & Sewer Authority.

The area’s water authority will have to significantly upgrade its Hardeeville facility within five years in order to meet the terms of a yet-to-be crafted discharge permit.

Deputy general manager Ed Saxon said the authority has a variety of ways to finance the improvements.

“We’ll program this into our future revenues, and with the idea that we can come up with the amount, we won’t have to affect rates,” he said, adding that there is always such a possibility, but it would be the last one they’d consider.

The authority won’t be the only one to shoulder costly upgrades.

About two dozen others, including other municipal polluters such as Savannah, and industrial ones such as International Paper, will have to reduce how much ammonia and other dissolved-oxygen demanding substances they dump into Savannah River. One coalition is clustered around Augusta and another near Savannah.

“It’s a very heavy lift, deep cuts, very expensive, it’s going to require major upgrades, tens of millions of dollars at these facilities to try to meet these cuts,” said Clifton Bell, of the firm Brown and Caldwell. Bell, who has been involved in the process, briefed about a dozen attendees during this month’s S.C. Water Resources Conference in Columbia.

“One of the questions is, ‘Who has to do how much?’”

But instead of waiting for permitting agencies to parcel it out, the polluters decided to forge a solution together.

“They basically said to agencies, ‘Will you give us a year to negotiate among ourselves who gets how much of this (discharge) pie? And we’re going to come back to you,’” said Bell.

He said the group’s modeling is only 2 percent away from a plan to eliminate the Savannah River’s dissolved oxygen deficit.

Some pollution triggers biological or chemical processes that make the water’s oxygen unavailable for fish and other creatures. The amount of oxygen the water can hold also varies with temperature, making it a more critical problem in the summer.

The reductions are being driven by Georgia’s water-quality standards, as required by the federal Clean Water Act. South Carolina has a similar standard, but the impairments being targeted are in Georgia waters. The Ga. Environmental Protection Division, S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control and the U.S.

Environmental Protection Agency are the agencies at the center of the issue.

The 23-member group has been meeting in Savannah and Augusta, but this month the Beaufort-Jasper Water & Sewer Authority hosted negotiations at Okatie headquarters, said Saxon.

Both he and Bell said the interactions have been productive.

“We knew those first series of phone calls everyone really wanted this process to succeed,” said Bell. “They weren’t going to cut their arm off, but they were willing to give a little bit in the interest of group success.”

Saxon said the authority has been involved in dissolved-oxygen talks since the 1990s, and that today Georgia entities hold 83 percent of the permitted waste load allocation, while South Carolina has 17 percent — a dynamic South Carolina hopes will shift eventually.

The progress shows that not every discussion between South Carolina and Georgia over the Savannah River is as rancorous as the fight over Georgia’s $653 million plan to deepen the Savannah harbor.

Since last fall, South Carolina legislators have attacked the deepening plans on a host of fronts. One was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal to install permanent dissolved-oxygen injectors, a dozen Speece cones, at the site of the dredging. The project is intended to prepare the harbor for larger ships traveling through the expanded Panama Canal.

Critics in the S.C. Legislature have dismissed the proposed oxygen-injection system as an “iron lung,” a “life-support system,” and a collection of untested, home-aquarium “bubblers.”

How does Georgia’s deepening project, which faces legal challenges by environmentalists and South Carolina officials, affect the polluters’ carefully built equation?

“That’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room. We know it’s there,” said Saxon on Monday.

Saxon suggested the Corps’ efforts to soften the effects of the deepening may offer opportunities.

“What we might be able to do is take advantage of some of their mitigation practices,” he said. But he added: “We have a clear direction to separate the harbor deepening from what we’re doing.”

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